A SAINT GOES MARCHING ON

By RICHARD CORLISS

A few months before shooting was to begin on Paramount's The Saint, the Aussie auteur Phillip Noyce went to visit the movie's star, who was on location in Australia for another film. When the actor didn't show up for their meeting, Noyce sighed and thought, "Well, this is Val Kilmer." That would be Val Kilmer the Hollywood bad boy, whose very name spurs some directors to spit venom. Noyce walked outside and into a dark street, then became aware of someone following him. "I stopped in a doorway and looked over my shoulder, but no one was there. Suddenly, Val materialized right behind me and whispered in my ear, 'Are you looking for someone?'"

That would be Val Kilmer the meticulous student of each role he plays, from randy Jim Morrison in The Doors to the courtly, consumptive Doc Holliday in Tombstone. On that night in Australia, says Noyce, "he was already acting the role of the Saint." Later Noyce and scriptwriter Wesley Strick trekked to South Africa, where Kilmer was shooting another film. "Let's go," the actor greeted them. He hopped into a Land Rover and, steering wheel in one hand, cigarette in the other, drove them madly across dirt roads to a distant campsite where he was living in a tent. Over a fire that evening Noyce asked Kilmer for his ideas about The Saint. "By the time he finished," Noyce recalls, "the sun had come up."

The sun keeps rising on Kilmer's career. Since his one-film reign as the Caped Crusader in the 1995 hit Batman Forever, the California-bred actor has built bridges and killed a lion in Ghost and the Darkness, played a thief with marital troubles in Heat, nearly outmannerismed Marlon Brando in The Island of Dr. Moreau and provided the voice of Moses for next year's Prince of Egypt, the first DreamWorks cartoon feature.

Now, at 37, he has a potential franchise role in Paramount's revival of The Saint. This isn't the clarety Simon Templar that George Sanders played in three Saint films in the '40s or the capering Roger Moore of the '60s TV show. Kilmer's Simon is a man unsure of his own identity and compelled to wear disguises as if he were shopping for a new soul. Similarly, Noyce eschews the campy look of Bond or Batman. The movie, about a post-Soviet plutocrat (Rade Serbedzija) who tries to mastermind a new Russian revolution, is dark--almost drab--and broody. It seems deeply riven between its impulse to entertain and its aspirations to update both Freud and Le Carre.

For playing author Leslie Charteris' mysterious superhero, Kilmer got $8 million, a share of gross profits and the possibility of not only starring in but also helping produce a sequel. "I've tripled my price tag in the past two years," he says, "by being very fortunate in getting Batman, and then by just putting my head down and working a lot. I've moved into a league of the more proven."

When it comes to on-the-set notoriety, Kilmer is in a league of his own. He has been accused of sabotaging productions by making up his own dialogue and deliberately burning a cameraman's face with a lighted cigarette while shooting Moreau (Kilmer says it was an accident). Some directors praise the actor's craft and attitude. "Val gives you nuance piled on nuance," says Heat director Michael Mann. "I had a spectacular time working with him." But others hear the word Kilmer and reach for their revolver. "He isn't just a high-strung, difficult actor," says Joel Schumacher, who hired Kilmer for Batman Forever and apparently rued the day from Day 1. "He's a deeply troubled man in need of psychiatric help."

Schumacher says Kilmer "can be one of the most charming, seductive people." But he claims that on the set, the actor often exhibited "tear-the-wings-off-a-fly behavior." One day, after shouting at an assistant director, Kilmer stormed into his trailer. Schumacher followed him inside and said he wouldn't tolerate such antics. "He wasn't used to being spoken to that way," Schumacher says, "so he shoved me against the trailer wall. I shoved him back and he ordered me out of his trailer. I said, 'You're a guest in this trailer. We're paying for it.'" Schumacher claims Kilmer didn't speak to him for two weeks. "It was bliss," says the director. "I didn't have to listen to the outpourings of a damaged megalomaniac."

Kilmer says the initial problem was Schumacher's refusal to let the actor watch his own dailies--the raw footage of his work. "I said, 'I don't know how to improve my performance if I can't see what I'm doing.' But for Joel, my work wasn't about acting. It was a modeling experience; he wanted to ritually sell an image. Once I realized that this movie was going to be a two-hour ad for the toys, that nothing I did mattered, I wasn't a pain in the ass." He says it was his choice to drop out of the series and that Schumacher offered him the lead role in his next film, A Time to Kill, which made a star of Matthew McConaughey. "Joel thought my turning it down was a reflection on him, which it wasn't. No hard feelings--I turn down a couple of movies a week."

Kilmer could be the sweetest guy in the world and his looks would still exude threat. His face is a billboard for California lust, with cool blue-green eyes, sucked-in cheeks and those Halloween wax lips, ever puckered and pouty. The rock-star-satyr features surely helped land him the Morrison role, as well as those cartoon ghosts of the King of Rock 'n' Roll in Top Secret! and True Romance. Yet the look stops just short of drop-dead handsome. Its steely seriousness--all that grit and drive with no hint of easy humor--suggests less Elvis Presley than Elvis Stojko. If Kilmer is to execute the actor's equivalent of a quadruple toe loop, it won't be from movie-star grace but from a triumph of the will.

Born in Los Angeles on the last day of the '50s, Kilmer fast-tracked his way into movies. The youngest actor ever accepted at Manhattan's famed Juilliard School, he co-wrote and starred in a play at Joseph Papp's Public Theater when he was 21. Two years later he landed the lead role in his first big-screen picture, the 1984 spy spoof Top Secret! As a U.S. pop star in East Germany, Kilmer did his own expert vocalizing of the film's tunes, fought off bad guys in an underwater saloon, played an entire scene backward and pulled off his underwear without removing his pants.

After playing a whiz-kid scientist in Real Genius and the studly Iceman in Top Gun, Kilmer did the George Lucas-Ron Howard fantasy Willow, where he met the English beauty Joanne Whalley. They were married for seven years, producing two children; they split in 1995. Kilmer subsequently dated Cindy Crawford and recently had to dodge rumors of a tryst with his Saint co-star, Elisabeth Shue. Noyce says that was just Val the perfectionist, obsessed with highlighting the film's romantic glow. "He worked so minutely on this relationship that some crew members said they were having an affair," says Noyce. "I don't believe that was true, but they spent a lot of time in the caravan together, and it was all about trying to be free with each other."

Noyce, who chose Kilmer after Mel Gibson and Ralph Fiennes said no, thinks Kilmer's bad rep is a bad rap. "We knew all the horror stories," he says, "and I can only presume some may be true. But he was never like that with me." Noyce took the actor's suggestions about Simon's elaborate disguises (they give the film a lift and an edge) and pumping up the romance. "The truth is that we made a different film from the one Paramount financed," Kilmer says, "and they went along with it." They also paid for a new ending, shot in January, after preview groups nixed a death scene for Shue's character.

The Saint may be too dour to spark a series, but Kilmer is ready for whatever happens. "Movie careers can be a machine-gun thing," he says. "You do three jobs, one of them will hit. I've always been confident about trusting what I can get from acting." That sounds like Val Kilmer the realist, who plans a long career giving moviegoers pleasure and directors hell.

--Reported by Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles and David E. Thigpen/New York

With reporting by JEANNE MCDOWELL/LOS ANGELES AND DAVID E. THIGPEN/NEW YORK